Abstract

Evaluation and assessment of new technologies is a rather complicated task due to the involvement of groups of experts, multiple criteria characterizing several alternatives as well as incomplete information about these alternatives. Expert analysis of new technologies by different aspects can be one of the ways of estimating the advantages and shortcomings of each of them and of forecasting their development and usage.

Due to the character of the assessment procedure, especially in the group expert situation, large amounts of information must be processed and analyzed in order to find the final conclusion. Additionally, several factors reflecting the quality of the results, quality of experts opinions, etc. must be calculated during the assessment process. Therefore, this task should be supported by some computer based tools. The paper presents such an information management system supporting the process of technology assessment. The system performs such functions like information collection and storage, interaction with experts and analysts, aggregation of information, graphic presentation of data and results as well as computes several statistical factors necessary to analyze the data submitted by experts. The system, being the first step towards development of more advanced decision support systems has been applied at IIASA for analysis of several technologies for energy production.